


The Muse of Nottingham

by theyalwayssay



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe - Victorian, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-21
Updated: 2013-08-21
Packaged: 2017-12-24 04:20:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/935269
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theyalwayssay/pseuds/theyalwayssay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He is called the Lovecraft of Nottingham, lonely, dark and friendless, haunted by the war. But when he can, he dreams. And he dreams of her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Muse of Nottingham

The man in the top hat and bow tie was a mystery, perpetually in one of two locations, promenading moodily about the street or sitting alone in the dark house at the end of the road. He neither conversed with anyone nor was requested to join in conversation with the more contented villagers. He was a man of enigma, occasionally portrayed as ‘the Poe of Nottingham’ but really simply referred to as the Doctor, a man returned from a war with the bullets still imbedded in his slumped shoulders and the deaths still imprinted in his sad eyes pointed perpetually towards his scuffed boot toes.

Anything the villagers of the small town might have known about the man was told in his books. However, even those were hardly indicative of the writer, who wrote of fantastical stories of a man traveling in a blue box, flying throughout the stars and meeting strange creatures. The stories were very popular with the village children, but the adults were less won over by the faery tales, as they contemptuously referred to them as. However, even the adults couldn’t help but be won over by the sheer amount of curiosity they felt for the strange literary recluse.

The man was also a mystery even to himself. The stories he wrote came to him in dreams, after which he would lay awake for hours, either scribbling them down so as not to lose the tales to the sieve of his memory or simply lying in the cold, ruminating over the stories like one might over a particularly expensive wine. His tales always tasted like dark coffee and licorice in his head, like the humidity of storm clouds and crispness of cold rain. However , once the words had been copied down and sent to the village printer to be turned into penny books for the children, all they tasted like was stiff parchment and stale ink. But, if it was not for the muse that constantly perpetuated his dreams, twisting his stories like jewels on a chain and often waking him in a cold sweat, he would have no stories to tell at all.

The muse of the reclusive Doctor never came to him in the same fashion. Occasionally, she appeared as a lady of reserve, a queen or a duchess perched upon a throne. She was once a lady of the wild, wind whipping through long dark hair tangled with one thousand whispering breezes. She stood on the edge of the great misty fjord, her dress blending and becoming the wind, the grass, the stars and sky. She was once simply a painting, her eyes and lips and fingers mere streaks of colour on a parchment-coloured canvas. And once, a single dancing faery, glowing blue as the daytime sky and brightly as the stars, leading him into a wild thicket of brambles and dark trees as old as the moon.

While the Doctor was well aware of his own loneliness, having never married nor courted in his younger days, he gave no thought to attempting to find a suitable mate for himself now, particularly seeing as his stringy, anemic form and tattered visage did not boast well for a young maiden seeking one with whom to start a family.

But that was before she arrived.

December 3, 1840

For how mine eyes have seen such wonder of wonders, but never once beyond the shadowy realms of dreams. I saw her today, the woman who has haunted me and led me to the stories that come from nowhere. She is here, in Nottingham. Her clothing has changed, her steps wearier, but I would know the eyes and locks of that woman had I been an instant away from death, for hers is the face that I see through everything in this veiled realm. Her clothes were bedecked in feathers of the finest blue, her eyes grey and sad and forever, her hair that once held the wind wrapped up in silver pins. She strode by my window in the early morning, her eyes moving only briefly towards my home before she strode away, early morning mist clinging to her bootsoles.

She has appeared to me like an angel in the depths of a great darkness. But she is not truly my muse, this I realize. She is merely an apparition brought about by my pain. But I must approach her. I must speak to her. It would be folly to do otherwise.

December 10, 1840

I met her first under the gas lamps of the pavement. She walked in furs and feathers, done up in a way a small child is when brought to a social gathering with their family. Dressed in a way that never reflects their nature.

The frost was thick on the ground and a light snow rained down upon me as I walked toward her, standing alone beneath a single streetlight, her eyes gloomy and far from this reality. She did not seem to see me as I stood a ways from her under a lamp of my own, the light glinting in the frost and protracting thousands of glittering eyes from the white aether to gaze upon the human anomalies before them. Had I not seen her through my window, I never would have abandoned my fireside on such a night as this.

I do believe she saw me. Her gaze wandered over my face and she stopped, staring as though I was a mirror reflecting all that was good and terrible in her inexplicable, impossible visage. We simply gazed upon each other, a man looking at a dream, until she turned and retreated from me in a great hurry, rushing towards a small cottage on the other end of the road and closing the door behind her. I have yet to see her again.

December 19, 1840

I have not seen the woman again. She has not passed by my window, and I have gone to quite a bit of trouble to actually go outside and promenade down the road looking for her. However, she seems to have disappeared. It is as though she truly was only an apparition.

December 25, 1840

A letter on the doorstep. All that I found. I awoke with a shiver, the first time I have since the muse of my mind turned human. There she was again, an elegant masthead on the prow of a ship, giving her silent goodbye as she sailed away.

It was then that I knew that she was gone from me.

However, there was a shadow of her, partially covered in snow and sitting with a blue wax seal on the stone step just outside my door. And while I it will pain me forevermore to read over this small piece of literature, I find it my solemn duty to record it.

My dear Doctor,

Please forgive me for my brief life. It was longer than I expected, for one who so expected death at a much younger age for myself. However, I found myself most miraculously still breathing, and in this short, beautiful time I find that I have been unable as of yet to introduce myself to you, the man whom I traveled so far to meet.

You see, I am something of a dreamer, and I often dream of things which would never enter my mind if not for someone to inspire them. Every night, I see a man somewhere inside the story that I have created for the entertainment of my nighttime mind. He is tall and wane, with a sloping shoulder injured in combat and sad eyes, but an adventure in his soul. And this specter has guided me through the brambles that seem to obstruct my thoughts with briars of confusion.

Two fortnights ago I dreamt of the phantom in the Nottingham church. He was praying, and prayed for me to find him. The moment I awoke, I knew where this man was to be found. But never had I guessed that he would be able to seek me out before I was able to find him myself.

My good, dear Doctor, you have been my muse for longer than you realise, having crept into my mind and given my great adventure the likes of which I could never imagine. And so I thank you. It has been a wonderful life, if only in my imagination.

Perhaps you wonder why I did not greet you when we met that night. The simple answer is that I did not know what to say. For I have conversed with you for years, but to see the phantom of my mind standing before me in the glaring light of reality was something that my feeble frame and mind were unable to assist me with. I only wish that I could have said hello. I did not anticipate that my hello to you would also be at the same moment as my farewell.

I am ill, Doctor. I am ill with a disease that none has yet been able to cure, a sickness of the brain that has left me with only a few months to live. I left Nottingham out of shame and vanity. I was ashamed for being too cowardly to properly speak to you when it was my one chance. I left on a boat in the night, and I will be in America by the time you read this. I do not wish to see the man I love and my inspiration watch as I grow weaker. I am too vain for that. Perhaps if I had spoken to you, you might have been able to heal me. However, by then time would have betrayed us both, as she is often wont to do.

Forgive me for loving you. I tried very hard to avoid it, but it appears that the sickness has worn away my heart as well as my body. It no longer is able to avoid getting torn asunder. Forgive me truly for being presumptuous, but for one who is about to die, one cannot be too reserved. None like to think that they died with a word on their tongue.

I do love you, my Doctor, my muse, as I have for nearly all my life. And the thought that I loved a real man and not just a fiction is a painful thought indeed. No matter. It only compounds what I feel already.

And so, with this letter in hand, I say to you, hello Doctor. Hello and goodbye. You yourself may choose which of those words I uttered to you first.

This belongs to you. I was once told my your phantom to give it to you. Perhaps it will lead you to my side as I take my last endless sleep. How comforting it would be to hold your hand in my last moments before I descend. A blissful fantasy.

It has been an honour to know you.

Lady Idris

Inside the thick parchment of the envelope, a glint of dull brass shown against the light swinging like a pendulum from the ceiling. The Doctor’s shaking hand pulled out a watch, a fob watch of the most beautiful craftsmanship he had yet seen. He could see his reflection in the dull metal, twisted and distorted like a broken mirror, and how he had wished, how he had hoped to speak to her, and now she was gone, a muse to his muse, a twin memory, entwined in each other’s pasts and futures without either knowing. She was an angel, an angel he loved with all the heart that war had not taken away, his companion on his travels to the far reaches of his overgrown mind.

The ink bled from the rain that poured from the old man’s storm cloud eyes. He rubbed a thumb over the surface, which glinted like a new opportunity. He opened the fob watch, and it glowed as bright as a new future. Perhaps it would take him home to her.


End file.
